The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
The development and deployment of internet of things (IoT) devices has proceeded with remarkable speed in the past several years. IoT devices are diverse, including everything from controllers of industrial equipment to smart watches and personal activity monitors. However, security infrastructure has not kept pace with the huge number and wide use of these devices. Some analysts estimate that billions of such devices will be operating and connected to internetworks within a few years, but there is presently no effective security architecture that can efficiently permit IoT devices to be secured, yet readily usable. Key constraints in this technical field have included limited processing power, limited memory, limited or absent user interface elements, and limited and intermittent network connectivity. All these characteristics of IoT devices make them difficult to integrate into existing client-server security systems. At the same time, misuse of IoT devices could be catastrophic by permitting an attacker or unauthorized user to gain control of industrial equipment or other systems that have embedded IoT devices.
Industrial and commercial operators are currently deploying millions of IoT devices in various enterprise environments. Pre-configuring millions of IoT devices with security information is difficult to scale and places an enormous processing burden on the operators. However, establishing trust with IoT devices in an enterprise environment during deployment without pre-configuring security information is difficult. In previous approaches, operators have shifted the processing burden of pre-configuration onto manufacturers or vendors that perform pre-configuration services.
Thus, there is a need for decreasing processing burdens of manufacturers and decreasing deployment processing burdens through a generic device attestation and enrollment process. There is also a need for increased data security throughout the attestation and enrollment process for these generic devices. There is also a need for a secure method of storing and accessing security service information that is tolerant of security breaches.